Novel Quotes - Page 18

There is an incessant influx of novelty into the world, and yet we tolerate incredible dullness.

Southern lawyers don't read novels much.

In real life, coincidences happen all the time. In novels, they are leapt upon with fury.

Universities are filled with poets and novelists conducting demure and careful lives in imitation of Eliot and Forster and those others who (through what seems to be have been discretion) made it.

Southerners make good novelists: they have so many stories because they have so much family.

The materials of the novelist must be real; they must be gathered from the field of humanity by his actual observation.

Miss Austen had shown the infinite possibilities of ordinary and present things for the novelist.

I can't think of any one film that improved on a good novel, but I can think of many good films that came from very bad novels.

I don't like to read novels where the novelist tells me what to think about the situation and the characters. I prefer to discover for myself.

The function of the novelist... is to comment upon life as he sees it.

It is the custom on Africa to always produce new and monstrous things. [Fr., Afrique est coustumiere toujours choses produire nouvelles et monstrueuses.]

Manners are of such great consequence to the novelist that any kind will do. Bad manners are better than no manners at all, and because we are losing our customary manners, we are probably overly conscious of them; this seems to be a condition that produces writers.

Nobody appropriates novelties as readily as the Portuguese.

The novelist works neither to correct nor to condone, not at all to comfort, but to make what's told alive.

Unformed people delight in the gaudy and in novelty. Cooked people delight in the ordinary.

The craft of the novelist does lie first of all in story-telling.

It is never possible for a novelist to deny time inside the fabric of his novel: he must cling, however lightly, to the thread of his story, he must touch the interminable tapeworm, otherwise he becomes unintelligible, which, in his case, is a blunder.

I never know what's going to happen in a novel. I don't have a plan or an outline.

I think of myself now as a writer, although I wouldn't go as far as to say 'novelist' because that sounds like a Victorian person.

The premonition of death may for many be a stimulus to novelty of experience: the imminence of death serves to sweep away the inessential preoccupations for those who do not flee from the thought of death into triviality.

It's hard being a hostage in somebody else's mouth - or a character in somebody else's novel.

Of all the hot liquors, I regard buttered rum as the worst. I believe that the drinking of it should be permitted only in the "Northwest Passage" and, even there, only by highly imaginative and overenthusiastic novelists.

I've never had time to read. But no one ever kept me from finishing a novel I loved.

I grew up as a reader as well as a movie-lover, so many of the novelists I admired - and so many of the great filmmakers I loved - were self-taught.

The contemporary American novelist benefits in a way from being ignored. It makes you angrier and makes you want to go into all of those places where you shouldnt.